Suite Francaise

The story of the discovery of the source novel is more dramatic than the film, Suite Francaise. But the film still manages a rare bleakness even for a WW II romance. We’re used to  films where war corrupts good people and disrupts the essential brotherhood of man. The point here is that people are naturally vicious, vengeful, murderous, awaiting only the excuse of war to reveal their vile selves.  Any humanity and possibility of love are the exception in this venal image of non-community.

The German forces occupying the French village are conventionally evil, rapacious, sadistic, arrogant and murderous. Hero Bruno is the exception because he has delayed personally killing anyone, plays classical piano, composes the titular opus for the French heroine Lucille, and tempers his Nazi duties out of regard for her.

The twist is in the characterizing of the noble French peasantry. It isn’t. The class system is as callous and bitter as the division by war. Upon the Nazis’ arrival the village erupts in personal vendettas, as the citizens spy and report on each other. No good turn is left unstoned.  

In this evil world the only good emerges out of evil. The occupation brings Bruno to Lucille. As she loses her illusions about her POW husband Gaston’s fidelity, she’s freed into an adulterous ardor and an even more dangerous political engagement. In Lucille Bruno finds a reminder of his better self, the sensitivity and virtue that alienate him from his soldier comrades. Fortunately, the central passion is not consummated. It’s aborted when Lucille sees Bruno kill the mayor in retaliation for the farmer’s murder of the Nazi planning to rape his wife. In a landscape of flawed humanity the brave farmer is crippled and the one humane Nazi officer is — a dutiful Nazi officer. His final service to Lucille betrays his duty and could explain why he “disappeared.” This is the tragedy of Iron Star-crossed lovers. 

The three central characters find redemption. Mousey wife Lucille grows independent enough to confront her mother-in-law, to at least open the possibility of an affair with the Nazi officer, and finally to reject him and his people in preference for work in the resistance. Madame Angellier moves from hard-case callous bitch to a kind of angel, briefly harbouring the Nazis’ prey, encouraging Lucille’s underground work and ultimately hiding and tending to the orphaned Jewish girl.

     Sad to say the film is packaged as a softcore romance rather than an incisive work of art. The romance is mush. The exposure of small-town evil is not as harsh as Clouzot’s Le Corveau. Worst of all, the film backs away from art by — though allowing the German characters to speak the requisite German — having all the French characters speak classy English. From that artifice the film never recovers.